The Challenge

The Royal Castle in Warsaw is one of the most important museums in the country. In its collections are the key exhibits and collections on the history of the Polish state.

The main challenge started in 2011 which was to try and create the most accurate digital copies of museum objects and the dissemination of knowledge about the collections gathered by a wide audience in the public domain.

The customer wanted to prepare a website that could be easily understood by search engines, but would also meet the latest standards in web design, development, responsiveness, and accessibility to WCAG 2.0 level AA standards.

The Solution

Squiz Poland, in cooperation with a team of logistics Royal Castle, designed and implemented a service which presents in a modern way museum exhibits, making sure the Royal Castle can reach an even larger group of people interested in history and the museum collection.

The website was implemented using the open source CMS - Squiz Matrix. The Funnelback search engine was used for indexing and presentation of more than 20,000 records, which is also used for personalising results.

The virtual catalog was constructed to realise business objectives, educational and promotional activities. At the same time the design is consistent with the various UX standards. The website is responsive (RWD) and fully accessible meeting with WCAG 2.0 level AA.

The Result

Thanks to the new website, the museum has provided its collections to a broad audience, which resulted in more interest from potential tourists and people interested in the exhibits for scientific purposes.

Users have gained access to museum collections, which are presented in a very high resolution. The collection is available globally in English and Polish.

For ease of content management the Enterprise class Squiz Matrix CMS was deployed making it even easier to manage and display information across multiple devices, to as many people as possible.

Service carried out by Squiz Poland received two awards:

Award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage for successfully digitizing collections.

Award of the International Association of museum ICOM for the skillful combination of presenting collections in a web format that easy to use.

These awards recognise the combined innovative efforts of the museum and of Squiz Poland in re-inventing services in a customer centric way.